Pros

Hundreds of servers spread across virtually every country on Earth.
Integrated server speed testing.
Kill switch feature.
Good speed test results.
Great name.

Cons

Expensive.
Offers only two licenses per subscription.
Clunky interface.
Few features.

Bottom Line

Hide My Ass will protect your Web traffic and route it through any of 900 servers spread across the globe, but for a hefty price.

8 Apr 2017Max Eddy

Security begins at the network, where your computer touches the wilds of the internet. To protect your devices and your precious data, you need a virtual private network (VPN) like Hide My Ass. The name is direct and so is the service, with an excellent, straightforward interface. It's a great service, but one that's hampered by a stingy allotment of licenses and some concerning logging policies. We have four Editors' Choice winners in this crowded category, but if you're taken by Hide My Ass's design, you'll probably appreciate NordVPN's similarly friendly experience and more generous offering.

What Is a VPN?

When you point your browser to a particular website, you're actually sending a request through the internet to the server where the website is stored. It responds with the information you requested, which is displayed on your screen. All along this trip, others can intercept your requests, or simply watch what you're browsing and (potentially) see what you're saying online. Most of the time it's a question of advertisers trying to monitor your behavior for targeted ads, but attackers might also be lurking on the network to steal your personal information, your passwords, and who knows what else. A new enemy could be ISPs gathering your data to sell for big bucks.

A VPN is designed to guard against all that. When you connect to a VPN, you're creating an encrypted tunnel between yourself and the VPN's server. Your request is relayed from the server to whatever site or service you're trying to reach, and the information travels back along the encrypted tunnel. That means that anyone lurking on your Wi-Fi network, or even your ISP, won't be able to see a thing.

Out on the internet, your IP address is hidden, since anyone watching traffic on websites will see the IP address of the VPN server. Provided the website you're accessing uses HTTPS, your data should be secure all the way along its journey.

The most obvious place to use a VPN is when you're away from your home network—at a hotel when you're traveling, for example, or perhaps at the local coffee shop's public Wi-Fi. Unsecured networks like these are a favorite of attackers looking to swipe your personal information. VPNs are also a key tool for journalists and political dissidents operating in countries with oppressive internet policies.

But VPNs can be fun, too! I know that sounds like a stretch, but it's true. A VPN can spoof your current location, giving you access to geographically restricted content like BBC streaming or MLB TV. Some VPNs don't appreciate these activities (which may be in violation of terms of service or even local laws) and content providers such as Netflix are also cracking down on users that spoof their location and the VPN services they use to do it.

Pricing and Features

If you're looking to try out Hide My Ass before you buy it, you're out of luck. The service does not offer a free version or a free trial. If you're in need of a great VPN, but have nothing in your wallet, you can always try a free VPN instead. Most of these services, however, place limitations on your service unless you pay.

Hide My Ass does, however, have a 30-day money-back guarantee, and offers loyalty rewards for convincing others to sign up. That said, it costs $11.52 a month, putting it on the higher end of VPN services. Editors' Choice winner KeepSolid VPN Unlimited costs only $5.99 a month—or as little as $2.99 a week on a short-term subscription.

If you're the commitment type, you can get a Hide My Ass subscription for $49.99 for six months or $78.66 per year. Those are decent prices for those durations, but it's worth noting that some VPN services such as VPN Unlimited offer lifetime plans, for long-term protection.

To buy a Hide My Ass subscription, you can use credit cards, PayPal, wire transfer, e-check, UnionPay, Diner's Club, or Cash at 7-11. You can also use gift cards from stores such as Starbucks or GameStop. Using these will make your payments semi-anonymous. What you can't use is cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which are accepted by many VPN services like Private Internet Access, NordVPN, and others.

Unfortunately, the service's relatively steep price seems even higher given the stingy number of devices it lets you protect per license. Hide My Ass only lets you connect two devices to the service, and only when those devices are connected to different servers. That's fine if you just have a computer and phone, but plenty of folks have several devices and probably share them with family members, too. Most other services, like Editors' Choice winner Private Internet Access VPN, offer at least five licenses without restriction. TorGuard starts you with five and then has low fees for adding as many more as you'd like.

There is one way around the restrictions, however. If you want to protect all the devices on your network, you can use Hide My Ass's handy guide for installing VPN software on your router. Installing VPN on a router means that every single device on your network—from your laptop to your smart fridge—gets the benefit of VPN. Other companies, like TorGuard VPN, offer routers and even streaming boxes like the Apple TV with VPN preinstalled.

A key differentiator between VPN services is the number of available servers and their geographic distribution. Lots of servers means you're more like to find a server that's not bogged down with other users. Lots of locations means more to chose from for spoofing purposes, but also ensures that no matter where you travel there will always be a nearby server for the best performance. Hide My Ass offers 859 servers across some 240 locations in 190 countries. This is really remarkable, since several of the best VPN services leave out huge swaths of the globe, especially Africa, Central America, and South America. Hide My Ass has these regions—and the rest—covered. That said, Private Internet Access has the most servers of any service I've yet reviewed, at more than 3,000. In fact, many services now offer more than 1,000 servers.

The Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows clients all use the OpenVPN protocol to connect. I prefer OpenVPN because of its open-source nature, and because it affords excellent speed and protection. The iOS client uses the IPSec protocol. Many VPN companies will support multiple protocols, and let the user choose. That's not a big loss for Hide My Ass, which is all about ease of use. The average user isn't going to care how their VPN connects, only that it does.

Despite its impressive geographic coverage, Hide My Ass has nothing in the way of specialty servers. Editors' Choice winner NordVPN, on the other hand, has a specific server type for high-speed video streaming, another that routes your VPN connection through the Tor network, others for P2P file sharing and BitTorrent, and yet another that provides double encryption.

Other services, like Private Internet Access and Spotflux Premium, include ad and tracker blocking, but Hide My Ass does not offer this kind of ability, either. If you need these kinds of advanced features, or even just the ability to change which VPN protocol to use, you'd best look elsewhere.

Hide My Ass has its company headquarters in the UK, a country that does have mandatory data retention laws. It's unclear if a VPN would be required to maintain information about users, but the possibility is certainly there. The company does keep logs about user activity, noting the IP address of the user, the IP address of the VPN server they connect to, and the time of connection. This information is stored for two to three months. Many other VPN services operate in countries without mandatory data retention laws, and have a strict no-logging policy. For some users, this won't matter; for others, it will be a deal breaker.

One thing that Hide My Ass will never do is inject advertisements into your web traffic. In the past, VPN companies have done this as a method of monetization. A Hide My Ass representative assures me that is not the case for this product.

Hands On With Hide My Ass

The Hide My Ass VPN Android app has a bright, colorful design that has finally made it to the Windows app. I had no trouble installing the Windows version on my Lenovo ThinkPad T460s, which runs Windows 10.

The app presents three scenarios to help you get online quickly. The first is Instant Mode, which simply looks for the fastest, closest server and connects you. This is great for day-to-day use, and will likely reduce the impact of the VPN connection on your web browsing experience.

The second is Location Mode, which lets you select whatever server you desire. You can search the extensive list by country or city, and you can save favorite servers, too. The fast server selection of Location Mode is very handy, but it doesn't offer specialty servers or information about the traffic load on the servers. You're on your own. IVPN and NordVPN, among others, provide stats about each server that can help you decide.

The third and final mode is Freedom Mode. Click it, and you are connected to a VPN server in what Hide My Ass calls the "closest free-speech country." When I tested the feature in my Manhattan corner office, it connected me to a server in Montreal.

People looking to access region-locked content with Hide My Ass might have a hard time doing so. When I tested Hide My Ass, I couldn't watch Netflix videos—regardless of the server I used.

Speed Test Results

No matter the VPN service you use, your connection will change somehow—usually for the worst. But not all VPNs have the same effect on your internet experience. To test this, I compare the average results from Ookla's speedtest.net to find the percent change with the VPN on and off. (Note that Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, which also owns PCMag.) Because networks are notoriously fickle things, I take the baseline measurements immediately after testing VPN speeds.

I do these tests twice. The first time, I use a server located close to my physical location. This puts the emphasis on speed and performance, and is likely indicative of how most people will use the service. Then, I perform the same tests while connected to an Ookla test server in Anchorage, Alaska, and a VPN server in Australia. The vast distances involved act as a stress test of the service.

Hide My Ass showed remarkably low latency in my domestic test, increasing it by only 5.6 percent. It's the lowest latency service I've yet tested. The service also held its own in the download and upload tests, slowing downloads by only 6.8 percent and uploads by 7.1 percent. However, Editors' Choice winner PureVPN is the fastest VPN I've yet seen. It actually improved download speeds by 346.4 percent. It also outperformed Hide My Ass in the domestic upload test, slowing uploads by just 4.9 percent.

In the international test, Hide My Ass didn't perform well in terms of latency. It increased latency by 274.7 percent. AnchorFree Hotspot Shield Elite, on the other hand, increased latency by just 155.4 percent. Hide My Ass did better with the download test, where it slowed downloads by 14.7 percent. But again, PureVPN has the best score in this category, actually improving download speeds by 403.8 percent. Hide My Ass also has solid upload scores in the international test, where it slowed uploads by 5.5 percent. Hotspot Shield Elite eked out the high score for this test, improving upload speeds by 1.4 percent.

Conceal My Donkey

It's easy to see why Hide My Ass has such an ardent following. It has great design, and is remarkably easy to use on just about any platform. It has also delivered solid speed test scores for two years running. Best of all, it's very, very simple. Unfortunately, its two license policy is quite restrictive, and it's hard to justify the comparatively high price of Hide My Ass. The company's logging policy is also not ideal. If you value a slick, friendly interface, Hide My Ass is one of the best. But you can get a great experience and features at a better price with Editors' Choice winner NordVPN. It's also worth taking a look at the other winners in this category KeepSolid VPN Unlimited, Private Internet Access, and PureVPN.

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About the Author

Max Eddy is a Software Analyst, taking a critical eye to Android apps and security services. He's also PCMag's foremost authority on weather stations and digital scrapbooking software. When not polishing his tinfoil hat or plumbing the depths of the Dark Web, he can be found working to discern the 100 Best Android Apps.

Prior to PCMag, Max wrote for the International Digital Times, The International Science Times, and The Mary Sue. He has also been known to write for Geek.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @wmaxeddy. See Full Bio